Last week the Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) launched its Body of Knowledge Chapter on Ethics in Melbourne to a small group of occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals. Participants were asked to outline an ethical challenge they had faced as OHS professionals.
In that same week, WorkSafe Victoria issued a media release that showed a poor follow-through by a business on advice from an OHS professional.
In a welcome announcement about additional funding for WorkSafeACT, the Australian Capital Territory’s Minister for Employment and Workplace Safety, Suzanne Orr, stated that
“Safety is everyone’s responsibility and we must work together to create a strong safety culture so all workers can return home safe at the end of the day”
Orr needs to have her people think a little deeper before using the “everyone’s responsibility” cliché especially as WorkSafeACT gains independence for the first time ever.
Mental health and burnout are workplace hazards with which many companies and workers are struggling. No matter what international or national organisations say about the hazard, it remains difficult to implement positive change at the workplace level. It is not helped by mainstream media articles that claim to prevent burnout and then provide very little information about how to prevent it.
A recent article in The Times, and reproduced today in The Australian, written by John Naish, is an example. The original article was headlined “How to prevent burnout at work”. This was retitled “Workplace burnout can lead to numerous serious health issues — and even premature death” in The Australian” (both are paywalled).
2020 will be the year when Victoria’s work-related death statistics receive a shake-up with the inclusion of road transport deaths for the first time. There is the potential to redefine Victoria’s occupational health and safety (OHS) risk profile if the recent New Zealand experience is anything to go by.
In relation to the release, last week, of the Brady Review SafetyAtWorkBlog wondered:
“It is worth asking whether a reliance on Administrative Controls could be interpreted as a level of negligence that could spark an Industrial Manslaughter prosecution.”
A seminar hosted by law firm Maddocks this week offered an opportunity to pose this as a question.
The 2020 business year has started with a bunch of occupational health and safety (OHS) seminars. Given last year’s moves towards Industrial Manslaughter laws in several Australian States, a discussion of these laws is inevitable and there are some voices calling out the politics of the issue. Herbert Smith Freehills’ Steve Bell is one of them.
A bombshell occupational health and safety report was tabled in the Queensland Parliament on February 6, 2020. Dr Sean Brady of the Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy undertook a forensic assessment of mining fatalities occurring over almost 20 years and has made recommendations that busts some mine safety myths and offers a, potentially very disruptive, way forward.
Brady issued 11 recommendations with many of them hitting the OHS regime of mining companies and safety regulators hard. As the report is over 300 pages, this article is based largely on the Executive Summary.